Orwell
talk – May 1st 2013, Café Create
I want to deal with the
final years of Orwell's life, not the details of his existence, but
the significance of his literary output. I will draw out some of the
hidden politics of Orwell, positions that he takes which are slightly
contradictory and some which have relevance for today.
Orwell opposes the war
until it begins, at which point he sees the necessity of
participating wholeheartedly in the war effort.
He works for the BBC,
fighting the war with words. Though he is in this period an opponent
of fascism and the official Communist Parties, he turns down
invitations to talk at anti-Soviet events on the grounds that the
organisers do not also oppose the actions of the British Empire.
His most memorable works
in the remainder of his life are Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
These are bleak works,
used during the Cold War as weapons of struggle.
Even after the Cold War, I
was taught Animal Farm at school as a warning against efforts to
reduce inequality and extend democratic control from below.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is
one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Yet within the
story of individuality crushed by authority, the protagonist Winston
Smith identifies the source of resistance: “hope lies with the
proles”.
Like Orwell, Winston Smith
does not see himself as part of the working class – even though he
too must work for a living. As a journalist, he perhaps has a greater
degree of autonomy over how his work is done, in an era in which
access to knowledge was more restricted than today, he had skills
which were not abundant.
So Orwell is detached from
the organised labour movement – he writes very little about
industrial disputes, and only advocates general strike action in
Britain in defence of the Spanish revolution.
His experience of fighting
in Spain, and the self-activity of working people in Barcelona as
they took over the management as well as the running of society had a
lasting impact on his political perspective.
In the early forties, he
writes The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.
In this essay, he argues
that the winning of the war is a necessary but secondary goal to
winning a revolutionary war against Britain's ruling class.
He puts forth his position
on national identity and the means by which a socialist movement can
transform Britain into a democratic society through appeals to
nationality. Orwell writes,
“Patriotism has nothing
to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism,
since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet
is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the
future and the past.”
Orwell imagines that a
movement for socialism will appeal to the patriotism of those who do
well out of the existing class system. He thinks it unlikely the
monarchy or the House of Lords will be abolished, the priority will
be changing the actual social relations rather than eradicating
symbols of the old order.
So he's not denying the
class division which exists – and he realises the basis upon which
it was established. He writes in Tribune in 1944:
“Stop to consider how
the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized
it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with
title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which
was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even
have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly
taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext
except that they had the power to do so.”
Also in his Tribune column
during 1944, he writes of Karl Marx in the same year:
“It could be claimed
[...] that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in
the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying
had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it —
what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes
are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It
was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was
Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of
politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been
under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate
him so much.”
In The Lion and The
Unicorn, Orwell advocates taking the banks, land, railways, mines
and major industries into public ownership. Income differentials
should be limited, he says – the maximum wage would be ten times
the minimum wage. The education system should be democratised, opened
up to access on the basis of merit rather than wealth.
Internationally, Orwell
wants the British Empire to be brought to an end, instead a
federation of socialist states. He wants it to be
“freed not so much from
the British flag as the money-lender, the dividend-drawer, and the
wooden-headed British official.”
For Orwell, what exists in
England, like any other nation, is the potential power of its
inhabitants. If unlocked, it would result in a revolution of sorts;
as he says in The Lion and The Unicorn, far from violent
unrest, a revolution means a fundamental shift in power.
For having won the
struggle to become citizens rather than subjects of the state, what
remains is the struggle for ordinary people to gain economic
citizenship, to dare more democracy.
Orwell says of democracy,
“to preserve is always to extend”. But there's a
real sense in The Lion and The Unicorn, that he's overlooking the
organisational forms which can do this.
For example, his view of
socialism is that the state will own the means of production and that
in this way workers will identify their interests with that of the
state. But how is this to be expressed?
Having written of the
dangers of dictatorial rule, of the crushing bureaucracy of the
party-state, Orwell seems quite complacent in The Lion and The
Unicorn. It is as if he assumes the English genius cannot become
subject to authoritarian government – he forgets that the advances
in democratic rights in the UK were as a result of the strength of
the working class and its ability to win reforms through collective
action.
Orwell recognises the
restrictions which are imposed on a supposedly “free” press:
“All the papers that
matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an
indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one
paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard
cash.”
It is surprising that
Orwell does not seem to have a vision of how a free press would
function in a socialist society. If the commissioning of journalism
is affected by the commercial considerations, how could this
constraint be lifted? Orwell worked for the BBC during the war, but
the problem with the state broadcaster is – who commissions the
commissioners? Public service journalism as it exists involves a
distance from the public, who are unable to put issues on the agenda
– as we've seen recently with the BBC's lack of coverage of NHS
privatisation policies.
Orwell was a critical
supporter of the Labour government which was elected in 1945. As
mentioned before, Orwell wrote for Tribune, the paper of the more
radical wing of the Labour Party at that time, led by Nye Bevan. As
health minister, Bevan played a leading role in establishing the
National Health Service. Also in the postwar period, a number of
utilities and industries were taken into public ownership. But these
state-owned enterprises were structured much as they had been as
capitalist firms, often with the same people on the board of
directors.
Workers did not appoint
the top bosses, they did not have representation in corporate
governance. Neither did consumers. This was, as Orwell had described
it well before anyone else, “state capitalism”. The state was
bailing out unprofitable sectors of the economy which capitalists did
not want to invest in directly.
Executive incomes were not
limited within enterprises, as they are in the Mondragon
co-operatives of contemporary Spain, but income inequality was dealt
with through the taxation system. Britain did not get a statutory
minimum wage until the 1990s.
Perhaps if Orwell's output
towards the end of his life is depressing it's because of the
distance from the optimism of the Spanish Civil War – in Animal
Farm, the veiled satire of the Russian revolution and the
bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union and in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which imagines a one party state in Britain, or Airstrip One, also
lent itself to being used by Cold Warriors.
But as is clear, Orwell's
appropriation by those fighting the Cold War depended on his absence
– for if he was alive, he would have something to say about
criticism of Communism without a similar criticism of capitalism.
Orwell was disappointed
that the Labour government was not more radical in transferring
wealth and power. He felt that it was as if the Conservatives were
still running the country. And they were – without democratic
control in corporate governance, the people running the big
businesses which dominate markets will be seeking to conserve the
power of vested financial interests rather than empower workers and
consumers.
It may have been possible
for the ruling classes of what's called “the West” to proclaim
for much of the twentieth century that capitalism was wedded to
representative democracy, but we now see in Western Europe that
election results differ greatly from what electors expect – in
Greece and Italy, technocratic governments have been imposed to
implement austerity cuts. Democracy being rolled back in the interest
of big business profits.
Looking back on the
Spanish Civil War, Orwell writes in 1943:
“In 1936 it was clear to
everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even
to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would
collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that
time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between
Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year
or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly,
hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand
Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were
pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet
when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany.
It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco,
and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British
ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult
questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important
question.”
Orwell would have
understood perfectly what has been going on in Britain since the
seventies and what is going on now across Western Europe: the attempt
to reverse the gains the working class made in the post-war period.
And in particular, since the financial crisis that started in 2008,
there is an attempt to pass the costs of systemic failure onto
working people.
The rationale for
austerity is that cutting public spending will boost GDP growth.
There's now no evidence for this – however, there is evidence that
what has been growing is the rate of return to private investors. So
the British ruling class isn't stupid – and the ruling classes of
states around the world which are also imposing austerity aren't
wicked either.
I think if Orwell were
alive today, he would be arguing for solidarity with the people of
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland, who are facing a
reduction in living standards more extreme than here in Britain. He
would be travelling to southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle
East, and Latin America to report on movements for political and
economic democracy.
Perhaps if he had lived,
Orwell would have written novels which gave us “real utopias” –
which presented fictionalised accounts of struggles for a better
life. He may have been able to do in literature what Ken Loach has
done in cinema and television – tell stories of ordinary people
taking collective action to assert their interests.
Today, the distance
between a journalist or novelist and their readers is not as great as
in the past. Advances in telecommunications such as social media has
closed the gap between paid commentators and opinionated amateurs on
the internet.
I would be asking Orwell –
why not give us sequels to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in
which there are, if not “happy endings”, but which have
narratives which offer hope to ordinary people that they can change
the world, they can work together to make life better. These would
not be books without conflict – for there will always be
disagreements and debates, heated arguments and heartache – but
books which engaged the reader with optimism.
